WESTFORD -- On the big ski-racing mountains, accidents do happen. So Pam Fletcher tries not to assign blame for her Olympic heartache 25 years ago near Calgary.

Fletcher, in fact, wrote a chapter titled "Don't Play the Blame Game" for the motivational book "Awaken the Olympian Within," put together in 1999 by former Olympic swimming champion John Naber.

The refusal to dwell on misfortune was instilled in Fletcher by her father Alan, who in 1963 -- the year Pam was born -- bought the land in Westford on which to build the Nashoba Valley Ski Area. That same determination brought a 25-year-old Fletcher to Calgary in February 1988 as the skier considered by many to be the U.S.'s best hope for an alpine skiing medal.

The thrilling downhill was her specialty. The girl from Acton, who first raced as a Nashoba Rover, had won a World Cup downhill race at Vail, Colorado two years earlier.

But one hour before Fletcher was scheduled to be the first racer down the Nakiska downhill course, her Olympic dream was, in one freak moment, shattered. After taking one last run on the practice course, Fletcher skied onto a narrow trail that competitors used as a shortcut back to the main lift.

"Technically, he really wasn't supposed to be there," she says.

But there on the trail coming toward Fletcher was a volunteer course worker named Steve Lounds.

He was 6-foot-2, 220 pounds.

Fletcher was 5-foot-4, 132 pounds.

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They were moving too fast to avoid each other ...

Fletcher was not convinced her right leg had been broken. She just knew it hurt. She became frustrated that nobody was assisting her "for what seemed like an eternity." She remembers looking at her watch, thinking, "OK, I can still get to the start. I still have a chance."

Several minutes later, a Swiss coach found Fletcher and radioed the U.S. coaches. When the U.S. team's orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Richard Steadman, asked Fletcher to try standing up, "I could feel the bone moving. I knew I was done."

Fletcher had a spiral fracture of the right fibula.

A short while later, Switzerland's Brigitte Oertli was the first skier in the starting gate. She was forced off the course by high winds. The race was postponed.

"It didn't pay to get out of bed that day," Fletcher says, smiling.

Still on the boards

The leg healed. Fletcher qualified for the World Championships the following year. She still skis. The fearless downhiller within her stirs during the adult slalom-racing series at Nashoba Valley, in which her younger brothers Al and Paul also compete.

But that is mostly fun.

"I want to ski until I'm 80-plus," says Fletcher, the marketing and sales manager at Nashoba, who turned 50 on Jan. 30. "The sport is exhilarating for me." She says so on a day her mother Nancy, 77, took a morning run down the hill at Nashoba Valley.

The Olympics, though, were for Fletcher lost forever on this very day 25 years ago. She would retire from World Cup racing at age 26 after the 1989 season -- her seventh on the international circuit.

"Accidents happen," says Fletcher. "Mine was a freak accident. But in our sport, because everything happens so quickly, and there are so many variables, things can go wrong in a split second. And all of a sudden, the game has changed completely."

Fletcher is proud to have been on the 1988 U.S. Olympic team, forever making her "an Olympian." She remained at those Calgary Games on crutches to cheer her teammates.

After 25 years, only one thing still bothers Fletcher: She never heard from the volunteer course worker with whom her hopes and dreams became entangled.

"He got up and just took off," she says. "He never asked if I was OK. He never tried to help me. He just collected himself and got out of there fast. I'm pretty sure he realized he probably shouldn't have been where he was."

Lounds told The New York Times at the time, "I haven't had a chance to say anything to her. She was crying and quite upset. I was trying to find my skis."

Fletcher has since been to three Winter Olympics. She covered alpine skiing as a commentator for CBS in Albertville in 1992 and Lillehammer in 1994. She worked for the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, conducting interviews shown on Jumbotrons at the event sites.

"Every time I watch the Olympics, it's a little bittersweet," she says. "Because of what happened to me in Calgary. I worked so hard to get there. I always have to hold on to the fact that being on the team was an accomplishment in itself."

A memorable run

The sweetest memory is winning a World Cup downhill in Vail in 1986, and doing so out of the No. 30 starting position. Fletcher at the time was only the third American woman to ever win a World Cup downhill.

She can still describe every bump and turn of that Vail course. She sounds like a golfer describing greens and slopes and putting lines. Misreading a downhill racing line, though, can lead to scarier consequences than leaving a putt a little short.

"When you get in the start gate at an Olympic or World Cup downhill, you better be confident about what you're doing," says Fletcher, who once hit 89 miles-per-hour at a national championship in Crested Butte, Colo. "You better have a plan. Otherwise, you better back out."

(The day after winning her only World Cup gold medal in the downhill at Vail, Fletcher tore ligaments in her right ankle on the second-to-last gate of the Super G. She was leading the race.)

Fletcher describes herself as a "thrill-seeker -- an adrenaline junkie." She once bungee-jumped 1,500 feet out of a helicopter in New Zealand. As far back as Fletcher can remember, she wanted to ski fast. "I remember following my dad down the bigger hills when I was little," says Fletcher, who attended her first national team camp at age 15.

One of her heroes was the great Austrian downhiller Franz Klammer, whose edge-of-disaster run to the gold medal in Innsbruck in 1976 inspired Fletcher and some friends to write a "Klammer Song." Some of the lyrics, sung to Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler," go like this:

As a young U.S. ski racer, Fletcher by chance wound up on a chair lift with Klammer in New Zealand. "I got my courage up to sing the song for him," she says. "By the time we got off the lift, he said, 'That's pretty good, you know.' '"

The two have become friends.

Fletcher has done TV commentary at the World Cup venue at Lake Louise in Alberta, but has never been back to Calgary.

"I've driven by it a number of times," she says. "It's always that bittersweet thing."

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